I just made the decision to not renew my family's .mac membership. We'll be shipping the three of us over to Google - for all the reasons cited here.

For those who like to have access to information offline (for me that's email, calendar, and address book) it's possible, with a little effort, to use existing Apple apps with Google.

Mail.app will connect to Gmail using POP mode. All email I send/receive via the web interface when I'm away from my primary Mac (G4 iBook) is downloaded to Mail.app when I log in with that.

iCal.app integration is not quite there yet. It's all one way. So I cannot subscribe to a Google Calendar in iCal and then update the iCal version of that calendar because it's flagged as read only. Spanning Sync (http://www.spanningsync.com/) is promising a tool that will truly sync those.

The Mac Address Book has all the tools mentioned in your article for maintaining a synchronized Address Book on the iBook and Contacts on Google. The day those become a chore I suppose Applescript or Automator will become handier.

Thanks for the great article - I'm sure it well help a lot of folks keep an extra $99 in their pocket and have a better suite of tools.